Plenty of wasteful spending to choose from, and bloated federal bureaucracies and fiefdoms... more than a little of that old Reagan favorite 'waste, fraud, and abuse', a whole other world of unproductive special-interest 'tax preference items' ('loopholes', to the rest of us:) that give unfair tax breaks to one politically-connected industry after another - at the expense of every other industry that doesn't get that same break.
Yep, National Industrial Policy, and taxpayer-paid direct subsidies run riot across the entire federal tax code.
Then there's the economically-depressive effect of all that convoluted, corrupt, tax code... business doing things for the artificial tax benefit, instead of for real, productive economic reasons.
And, the direct benefit we could achieve of some $300 B. returned to the economy every year by drastically reducing the massive 'compliance costs' business and individuals pay to conform to our ridiculously-complicated tax system.
Believe me, Enron had nothing on the Federal Government when it came to fraudulent book-keeping. Why, the B.I.A. over at Interior Dept., hasn't been able to pass an audit for well over 100 years! Much of the Corps of Engineers boondoggle spending (canals going where no one really uses them, sand shifting projects on the coasts, etc.) has a dollar return rate of less than one.
A partial list of un-needed government spending would have to look where the big bucks are: Interior, Agriculture, Energy, DoD, HUD, Commerce... but every government program could stand a good look and maybe a trim. |
